


i connect the stars to build a map to you

by wordsandstars



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Multi, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 02:03:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4942474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordsandstars/pseuds/wordsandstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven grows up loving the stars, and then the boy who sees the constellations in her eyes. Bellamy lives his life with his back turned to the sky, eyes permanently fixed on his sister, always fearful of her being discovered. Clarke spends her childhood looking past the stars entirely, focused on the planet she yearns to be on beyond them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i connect the stars to build a map to you

**Author's Note:**

> This challenge was such a thrill to do, and I'm so happy I did it. Much thanks to [Sophia](http://cutebot2000.tumblr.com/), who beta-ed this fic for me, and to thehundredrarepairs team, for making this all possible. Title's from Where We Came From, by Phillip Phillips.

_Raven grows up loving the stars, and then the boy who sees the constellations in her eyes. Bellamy lives his life with his back turned to the sky, eyes permanently fixed on his sister, always fearful of her being discovered. Clarke spends her childhood looking past the stars entirely, focused on the planet she yearns to be on beyond them._

*:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *

Raven limps out of the Med Tent, half past midnight, two days after Clarke leaves.

(Somehow, she feels like that’s how they’re all going to be telling time now, subconsciously or consciously. Like the Mountain, and all that happened behind its stone walls, is nothing compared to Clarke walking away, too consumed in her own darkness to see how everyone else treated her like the sun.

Who is she kidding? She knows it is. Compared to Clarke, Cage is nothing, means nothing. Clarke is everything.  


And Clarke’s absence hurts worse than a drill in her hip ever could, anyway.)

She makes her way past a sleeping Abby, lying still on a cot, and Kane, next to her on the ground. Past the scattering of delinquents, stretched out with hands touching or just straight up cuddling. The tent is crowded, too crowded, but even with a bum leg Raven is still agile and light, and she makes it out relatively silently.

The camp is empty, save for a few roaming guards and haphazard delinquents strewn out by dying fires. Monty and Miller are at a fire closest to her, and behind them at the fence is Miller’s dad. The two are talking quietly, but as she watches Monty’s head flops easily onto Miller’s shoulder, and happiness swells in her at the smile that plays on Miller’s face as he looks fondly down at the younger boy. At least something good came from that Mountain, then.

She moves on from them without either Miller catching her, trying to find a good place away from everyone and everything to stargaze.

If there’s a single thing she misses from the Ark—besides two working legs—it’s how close she was to the stars. They were her one constant in her life, something not even Finn could match. Always there, just far away enough that she couldn’t really touch but close enough that she felt sometimes like she could, burning so bright they hurt to look at. They were the only things with her when she went outside for repairs, keeping the darkness at bay.

She doesn’t miss the Ark, but she misses the sky it sat in. The stars that surrounded it, and Raven herself, no matter what.  


Raven finally decides on a spot not too far away from the fence—no longer electrified, because even the ground itself is growing scared of Sky People now. No one’s coming for them, and certainly not anytime soon. It’s grassy and dry, away from most of camp, and quiet. She grew up with machines humming, learned to match her heartbeat to that sound, but she’s finding there are times when she loves the silence, too.

Her heartbeat is completely her own, always beating too fast with adrenaline that never quite runs out before the next time it has to kick in.

Carefully, slowly, she lays herself out on the ground, legs splayed out and arms pillowing her head. Her whole body is aching, but the grass and dirt is no harder than the cot she’d been on before. She shifts her attention to the stars instead.

They’re as bright as they’ve ever been from this distance, sparkling and shiny and making her breath catch in her throat. The feeling in her chest looking at them is homesickness, sitting heavy beneath her ribcage. The only other time she gets it is when she thinks of Clarke.

It’s not long before she hears footsteps, and she startles but doesn’t look away from the sky. She hears a sigh, and her lips turn up, because it’s not Wick or Kane or some guard like she was expecting, but Bellamy.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Medical?” he asks, even as he’s sitting down next to her. She shrugs as best she can and pats the space next to her, so he scoots closer and stretches out.

He’s looking at her, not the stars. She knows it, should feel uncomfortable by it, but she doesn’t. The weight of his gaze is a welcome one, and she shifts until her head is pillowed on his arm.

“How often do you miss her?” she whispers. Feels Bellamy’s lips in her hair.

“Every minute,” he says there. His breath causes minute shifts of her hair, puffing against her scalp.

“Me too,” she says, because it’s the truth.

Raven’s comforted by two things, laying there: one, that the ache she’s feeling is not a lonely one. She and Bellamy were the closest to Clarke, both before and during the ordeal with the Mountain, so while everyone else will and does miss her, what they’re feeling is not like what Raven and Bellamy are.

Second, she’s just happy that wherever she is right now, Clarke is under the same stars that they are.

“She’ll come back,” Bellamy says, rough voice cutting through the silence. She nods against his arm.

“And we’ll be waiting,” she replies.

She falls asleep before dawn comes to block out her beloved stars, comforted by Bellamy’s presence and Clarke’s someday return.

The stars and Clarke are a home she misses, but Bellamy’s a home that’s still right here.

*:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *

_Raven becomes a falling star when she hits Earth’s atmosphere and sets a fiery path to the ground. Bellamy defies constellations and makes a new one when he shoots Jaha and makes it onto the dropship headed for Earth. Clarke shines bright for a while then collapses hard, and forms a black hole out of herself._   


*:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *

Clarke’s lost.

Not geographically, though. She has a vague idea of where she’s going—away from Mount Weather, and from any type of camp, whether it be made up of Grounders or Sky People. East, towards the ocean. It’s been about a month, she thinks, and she hasn’t reached it yet, but she doesn’t care.

That would mean having to turn around, after all.

So in general, she knows where she is in the world. That’s not her problem. No, she’s lost in her own head, at war with her mind. It may seem a little overdramatic, but now seems like the first time Clarke’s had a chance to really let everything that’s happened to her on the ground catch up with her, right up to that moment of watching a spear enter her new friend’s chest. And it hits hard.

Her first night alone, deep within the unknown forest, she doesn’t sleep. She sobs, and she screams, and she struggles for air when all the guilt piles up and threatens to suffocate her. She scratches at the dry blood on her hands, hidden beneath her sleeves, until it mixes with new blood of her own. When it dries beneath her nails, she falls back, barely registering the ache in her back when it hits the hard forest floor, and stares up at the stars.

Clarke never paid them much attention when she was younger, really. They were always in the corner of her eye, though, because she was always focused on Earth, beyond them. Stars were scarce in her drawings, only there to highlight the ground she’d sketched out below, a final touch to what could have already been a completed drawing. Earth, meanwhile, was her muse, her inspiration to draw and to even breathe, some days.

Earth, lo and behold, has not paid her back for her devotion. The stars, though, they don’t hold her years of forgetting them against her. She starts sleeping during the day—high up in trees or in the deepest reaches of caves, lest someone come along—and travelling at night, just so they’re above her constantly. They’re a comforting, steady presence, like Bellamy once was. And every night, she spots something new in them, like she used to do every day with Raven.

She misses them the most, she knows. Everyone else shows up in her dreams occasionally—the good ones, not the nightmares that threaten to pull her under the water she’s so desperately trying to keep her head from sinking below—but Bellamy and Raven, they’re always there. Smiling like they never did in real life, touching her in ways that never happened in real life, either.

Not being able to say goodbye to Raven weighs on her, surprisingly heavier than a lot of other things she did or didn’t so. But she’s happy for it too, because if Clarke had been facing the both of them, she wouldn’t have been strong enough to leave.

She loves the both of them. She didn’t know it before she left, but with all the time she’s had to herself lately, she knows now. She’s not sure how she’s going to deal with it just yet, or if what she feels for either will even go anywhere. How it’ll work, if it ever does. But it’s enough to keep her going, for now. That love.

Clarke wonders how they’re doing. If Bellamy’s finally getting the respect he deserves from Kane and her mother and the guards from the Ark. How Raven’s leg is treating her these days. How far her latest inventions have come. If Bellamy’s still on good terms with his sister.

She hopes they miss her.

One night, she stops walking when she hits a clearing, lays herself out in the middle, and looks up at the stars. She can remember, once, finding Raven in a similar position, back at the dropship camp. Clarke’d been ready to leave her alone, but Raven had seen her out of the corner of her eye, motioned her over. The two of them had sat there in silence for hours. It was one of the happiest moments Clarke had on the ground.

She hopes, despite all that’s changed, all that she’s done, that Raven’s still stargazing somewhere, with Bellamy, and that there’s still a place on her other side for Clarke to go.

*:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *

_Clarke catches Raven when she hits the ground, with Bellamy to soften the blow when she buckles under the weight of 2 bodies. Clarke and Raven fit themselves into Bellamy’s chain of stars, strengthening and recreating his once lonely constellation. Raven and Bellamy find Clarke and pull her out of her own darkness, and place her once more in the sky._  

*:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:･ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *:ﾟ✧ﾟ･: *

 A month and three weeks since Clarke’s left, and too much has changed for Bellamy’s liking.

He knows that they’re moving on without her with their lives, have to be, but it still aches when he contemplates how far they’ve come and it’s not with her at his side. It doesn’t seem right, really, that they could do anything without her.

It’s hard to lead without her, too. He’s not even technically in charge, not with Abby Griffin or Kane or any number of adults that grossly outranked him on the Ark and still do now, but they and all the remaining hundred look to him on anything important, so it feels like he is. He can do it on his own, make decisions and have all eyes on him, but it’s hard adjusting to carrying that weight alone again. He hasn’t had to do it in so long, almost his entire time on the ground, and it’s a hard change to say the least.

And then without even being asked, Raven starts taking some of it off his shoulders. She joins him in Council meetings and fights with Abby alike, intersects the paths of teenagers on their way to him and talks through their problems with them instead, sits with him with a hand pressed to the back of his neck in comfort when he has his head in his hands and is trying not to scream, when everything comes down on him and makes it hard to breathe.

She’s nothing like Clarke—Raven’s fire, burning hot and bright, where Clarke is water, cool and calming. Clarke thinks, and Raven acts. Clarke is all about the big picture, but Raven, much like Bellamy really, focuses on the pieces of the puzzle in the search to making it whole. They’re opposites in so many ways, with Bellamy weaving through their different parts in the middle, but that’s good for him. Raven’s nothing like Clarke, but at the same time she’s everything like her. She’s helping him, most importantly.

He needs Clarke, still, and so does she. But he needs her too, and that’s working as enough.

She comes to his tent one night, likely coming from the work space she now shares with Monty instead of Wick, and proceeds to drag him out to look at the goddamn stars.

“I like them,” she says, the look in her eyes just fucking daring him to challenge her.

“I don’t,” he retorts, but he keeps where his hand where it is, wrapped in hers, and lets her drag him out into the night. “Why?” he asks as they walk.

She stops, turns back to him with her lips pursed. Like she’s thinking, or just annoyed. “Because they’re bigger than any of us.”

“And you find that, what, comforting?”

She nods and goes back to walking, bringing him along with her.

Once they’re settled on the ground, in a different place than the last time he found her like this and joined her, she pays absolutely no attention to him, focusing completely on the stars that shine above. She looks entranced, and far be it from him to disturb her when she looks so at peace.

Still, he doesn’t exactly understand the appeal. Sure, they’re pretty, but they all look so alike.

He’d spent most of his time on the Ark looking out for anyone that could take his sister away from him. Watching his mother to try and figure out all the things she kept from him. Keeping his sister entertained. He hadn’t had time for stargazing, of all things, then, and he doesn’t have time for it now. And yet, it seems what Raven is constantly set on.

He keeps his eyes mostly set on her instead of the sky, and when she turns to him suddenly, she raises an eyebrow at him but only says, “Do you know any constellations?”

Bellamy shakes his head as best as he’s able, making his disinterest clear on his face as he does.

A hint of a smirk settles on Raven’s face and she says, “A lot of them are based of Greek myths, you know.” She laughs when he visibly perks up at this.

Clearly, the joy she gets out of making fun of him has not diminished throughout their hardships.

“Alright,” he says gruffly, making it seem like he’s eager for her to stop, even though her laughter makes his chest light and head blank. “Like what?”

She grins, a rare feat these days, and turns her face back upwards, scanning her eyes around. Then, she points, draws a haphazard circle with a line around with her finger, and says, “There. Aquarius.”

“Cupbearer of the Gods,” he offers up immediately, even as he squints into the inky darkness above and struggles to find the constellation she’s pointing out to him. He only sees it when a small yet heavily calloused hand grips his chin and physically moves his head until her finger brushes up against a star in his line of sight.

“There,” Raven says, sounding like she’s amused but trying not to be, tracing the pattern above them in the sky again. She lets him go, and he makes a show of rubbing at his chin. As if any touch willingly offered from her would be unwelcome.

“So, Aquarius,” he says, and sorts to sifting through his limited knowledge of the immortal—minor to the grand scale the Greeks are on, forever young only because Zeus chose to make him so—to jumble a story together for Raven. He manages a few sentences about the guy, which is enough to satisfy Raven, apparently, because her focus shifts away from him and to the stars again, looking for another constellation.

They go on like this for about an hour, until Raven finally lets her arm drop from its near permanent position extended upwards. It lands on his so that they’re pressed together from shoulder to wrist. She waits a beat, and then twists their hands together so that their palms touch. She seems unsure about it, so he gives her fingers a reassuring squeeze, which seems to give her relief, and the nerve to say,

“I know you miss her, but do you think she misses us?”

Bellamy lets out a long breath, turning his head to look at her. She isn’t looking at him, much like she’s been doing the rest of their time out here, but this time it seems more like she’s avoiding him on purpose rather than just being too focused on the sky above to really acknowledge him for too long.

He doesn’t say anything, not wanting to do something stupid like give her some of his possibly false hope. False, because he hopes desperately that she does, that she feels like he does, like some part of himself has just detached and is waiting for her to come back, because it’s so used to her being at his side it doesn’t know what to do with itself anymore. But he doesn’t _know_. She has to miss them all, he figures, but she was the one who left. It gnaws at him, and he doesn’t want it to do the same to Raven. Although, hell, it probably already does.

He’s been silent too long; Raven’s looking at him, one sharp eyebrow raised like a challenge. She’s staring, and he’s only just looked to her too when she lets out a huff and struggles to get up, ignoring the hand he offers as help. She walks away without looking back.

He waits until she’s out of sight, back into the Ark’s hulking remains to the sleeping area she shares with—well, somebody, probably, before he bothers even sitting up himself.

She’s so much like him in so many ways, that when they’re together, too long and too hard, they burn each other. They clash, and fight, and although they find their way back to each other no matter what, it doesn’t manage to feel right. Clarke balances them out, and they’re both lacking the final weight in the scale.

Without anything left to do, Bellamy looks up at the stars again. He wonders, vaguely, if Clarke’s even seeing the same constellations that he is right now.

Fuck, does he miss her.

Eventually, he makes his way back inside to his own sleeping area, which is technically meant for two people and officially houses two on any records, except Octavia’s been sleeping outside in a tent the whole time they’ve been back with Lincoln. So, he’s expecting it to be empty as usual, but when he pushes open the door there’s Raven, curled up on his bed. She looks relaxed enough there that he’d think she was asleep, except that her eyes are open and her sharp eyes are on him from the moment he opens the door.

They don’t say anything while he wanders around the small room, dropping things here and there and getting ready to pretend to sleep. She doesn’t move her body or her gaze until he’s standing in front of her, unsure of how to proceed. Then she finally sits up, his thin blanket pooling in her lap.

“She didn’t say goodbye to me.”

Bellamy sighs and sinks onto the bed next to her. In a rare moment of vulnerability, Raven lays her head on his shoulder once he’s settled.

“I don’t think I would’ve liked to see her like that, though,” she continues, voice resolutely even, “Apparently even more fucked up than the rest of us.”

“Yeah,” he agrees; he doesn’t know what to say, but silence seems too heavy right now.

He turns into her, rests his chin on the top of her head, and she reaches one hand up to fist loosely in his shirt.

“She has to miss you, Raven,” Bellamy says, after a considerable silence. “She loves you.”

The laugh she lets out sounds harsh and gritty. “Not in the way I want to be loved.”

Bellamy clears his throat. “You never know,” he allows.

She pulls back, looks at him quizzically.

“Do you?” she asks, finally.

“You never know,” he says again, and her mouth pulls up at one side.

She leans back into him, and pushes his back with her weight until he’s lying down on the small bed, her snuggly on top of him. Neither of them talk about or look at the extra Clarke-sized shape they’ve left empty.

“She misses you too,” Raven says into his neck. Her mouth brush against his pulse point with every movement of her lips.

 


End file.
